The Expression of the Art of Poetry Through Description: The Andalusian Example

Abstract

The Arabs, who stayed in Andalusia for about eight hundred years, initially drew
upon the cultural heritage of the East, but in the following periods, they developed a
distinctive literary foundation for poetry with the literary activities they put forward. It
is evident that they produced a substantial body of work both in the classical themes of
Arabic poetry such as madih, satire, elegy, ghazal, and in genres unique to Andalusia
such as muvashshah and zajal. In addition to the aforementioned theme the poets also
gave importance to descriptive poetry. At first embedded within other types of poetry,
description poems later became an independent genre. The poets tried to describe
everything they saw around them, especially nature, and made sensuous and imaginative
descriptions that appealed vividly to the senses In this study, the couplets of Andalusian
poets describing the concept of poetry are discussed. These descriptions were generally
emerged as an effort to keep poetry superior to other literary genres. Their descriptions
of poetry using the art of simile are highly original. The poets sometimes wrote poems
describing the appearance of the verses in terms of shape and sometimes the content,
wording and meaning of the poem.